One of the year’s more promising films is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) directed the film from Peter Morgan‘s script which adapted the novel of the same name by John Le Carre. The cold war-era tale stars Gary Oldman as a former MI:6 operative who comes out of retirement to ferret out a mole in the intelligence organization. Benedict Cumberbatch, Ciaran Hinds, Mark Strong, Svetlana Khodchenko, Toby Jones, John Hurt, Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke all appear in the film, footage of which premiered to great reception at the recent European Film Market in Berlin. It’s one hell of a cast, and Universal evidently agrees.

Universal has taken the rights to the film over competitors such as Summit Entertainment and The Weinstein Company. We don’t have a release date yet (or a trailer, sadly) but you can bet that Universal will happily trumpet the film as the first new release to feature Best Actor Oscar winner Colin Firth. (Though the film was shot prior to his win; Michael Hoffman’s Gambit or Park Chan-wook’s Stoker could be his first post-Oscar gig; both are tentatively set to shoot this spring.) [Deadline]